5 Effective Ways to Boost Your Laptop’s Battery Life

Laptops are and have always been important devices and no matter how many tablet PCs are launched, they can never replace the traditional laptops. Laptops will remain better than Tablets. However there is one slight concern about laptops which most people fret about, and that is the battery life. Everyone wants a great battery life that can allow them to work for long hours without the need for charging it again and again, but this rarely happens.

So let’s take a look at some simple yet effective ways that can help you improve your laptop’s battery life:

1. Lower The Screen Brightness

One of the main reasons for more battery consumption is the bright screen of your laptop. Since most laptops allow users to adjust their screen settings, you should choose a lower brightness which can improve your battery life by leaps and bounds. If you don’t know how to lower your brightness, then all you need to do is to head over to the Power options in the control panel and click on Change Plan in the advanced settings. Then click on expand option next to Display and select a percentage for the brightness.

2. Upgrade Your RAM

While you might wonder what the RAM has to do with your laptop’s battery, increasing the RAM can lead to a vastly improved battery life since the system won’t have to rely on the virtual memory, which ends up eating a good chunk of power. Once you get your RAM upgraded, not only will you experience a decent increase in the speed of your laptop but your battery life will improve as well. If you have Windows 7 installed on your laptop then you can easily increase virtual memory in windows 7 by using this guide.

3. Don’t Leave Your laptop on Standby

Leaving our laptops on standby while doing something else, is a mistake that many of us tend to make. While we think doing this might not cause any power usage, it actually has a detrimental effect on the battery. A much better option is to hibernate as it saves a good amount of power by shutting off the laptop completely, yet allowing us to resume our work from where we left.

4. Disable Background Applications

While you are working on your laptop, there might be a few applications running in the background which you are unaware of, like Yahoo messenger, iTunes etc. More often than not, these applications not only make your laptop sluggish, but also consume unnecessary power which results in reduced battery life. To view the background applications, press Ctrl+Alt+Del, then click on the Processes tab and simply close the ones that you are not using. However make sure you do not touch any system processes since it can lead to serious consequences.

5. Turn off Bluetooth/Wi-Fi

Normally you wouldn’t have paid any attention to the fact that your laptop’s Bluetooth or Wi-Fi are turned on, but now you should, as even they can contribute to power usage. When you are not transferring any files by Bluetooth or not accessing the internet via Wi-Fi, there’s no need to keep them running, so simply turn them off as it can lead to some amount of energy being saved. While there are some other tips and tweaks as well that can improve the battery life slightly, the above five should be sufficient to save a good amount of battery.

Author: Harshit Singhal is a tech enthusiast who runs a tablet reviews blog and occasionaly writes about the best tablet under 300 on his blog.